Pathway to massive mobility in educational computing

Mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and "smart-phones" are becoming pervasive. Unfortunately, experience in terms of massive institutional integration of mobile devices is lacking. This paper explores technological, architectural, pedagogical, behavioral, economic and political considerations raised by the move towards a mobile device-based paradigm in a university environment. The strategy, initiatives, and experiences of City University of Hong Kong (CityU) on its path to improve learning interactivity with PDAs in large classrooms are used for illustration. Issues and success measures with corresponding data are presented. This project which began as a single-course pilot has now been escalated to the university's CIO. Further plans include an investigation of university-wide use and consideration to replace a number of campus desktop computers with mobile devices, thus enabling more flexible computing device use and lowering the total cost of campus computing. Additional considerations are arising as CityU moves from supporting 800 to approximately 16,000 student users of various age groups, as well as programs, faculties, and administrative entities. As a means to structure and explain adoption activities, we draw on Moore's technology adoption model and Nolan's stage hypothesis in this article. Issues relevant to the initiation phase of Nolan's model include high profile opportunities, vendor collaboration, institutional approval, and test successes. Issues relevant to Nolan's contagion phase include device selection and support, system access, multiple authoring environments, learning motivation, instructor training, and faculty development. Control phase issues include infrastructure, interface standards, portal considerations, learning management system integration, learning management system extension, embedded use, curriculum revision, policy formation, and "have versus have-nots". In recognition that mobile device introduction is a long way from integration maturity, issues in this phase worthy of consideration include pedagogy and evaluation. The paper illustrates the multi-faceted nature of the problem and need for involvement from multiple stakeholders to achieve a robust and holistic solution to massive mobility in educational computing.